As of Wednesday, July 18, 2007, the ability to comment on blog posts here at the Word Nerds' archive site has been disabled. This measure is being taken to prevent the flood of comment spam, and the attendant notifications, that have plagued this site.

If you have iTunes, just grab that URL by right-clicking (or
control-clicking, if you have a Macintosh). Then go into your iTunes,
and under the Advanced menu select Subscribe to podcast... Paste that
URL into the box, and you're done!

The feed of archived shows
will also be called The Word Nerds, so you'll want to just pay
attention to program numbers to keep the two feeds straight in your
aggregator.

Dave Shepherd announces changes to The Word Nerds' blog and feed, which will take place this weekend. The web address for The Word Nerds will remain thewordnerds.org, and the feed address is now thewordnerds.org/feed.

This may mean duplicate downloads for editions of TWN that you have already received from April and May 2006. You can correct this on your end by changing the settings in your podcatcher software so that you are receiving only the most recent episodes of podcasts, not all episodes.

If, despite this, you still receive duplicate downloads, I apologize. After this weekend (5/27/06) you should only get one copy of each show through our feed.

Cross your fingers! Let's hope this works! This will mean a more accessible comment function on our blog, as well as a bulletin-board-style forum in coming weeks.

We just learned from Apple Computer that The Word Nerds will be featured as a "splash" on the front page of the iTunes Music Store for about a week.

We are very happy to have this extra promotional push by Apple, and we expect this will mean a lot of new listeners and members of the Nerdly Community within the next week.

As I said in my previous post, I was planning sometime this week to switch the Word Nerds blog over to a separate server and start using WordPress to publish the blog and the podcast feed.

However, since this move could cause our web presence to disappear for a day or two, I think it is probably prudent to hold off on that migration for another week or so. I don't want new listeners to be see our logo prominently featured in the iTunes Music Store and then have absolutely nothing happen when they try to subscribe to the podcast (due to a one-day interruption).

Therefore, the migration to WordPress will probably take place sometime around the weekend of May 20. If you are a regular subscriber and you don't find a new edition of TWN in your podcatcher early that weekend, it means only that we are moving some things around, nothing more.

Thank you for your patience and understanding. We're not going away; we're just trying to improve our look.

The Word Nerds will be making some changes to our blog setup sometime in the next week. (This means sometime between May 9 and May 16.)

While we will continue to have our podcast audio files hosted by our favorite podcast hosting company, Liberated Syndication, we will be moving the blog and feed portion of the podcast to a separate server account. We will be creating our blog posts and podcast feed with WordPress software.

What this means to listeners is this: our blog will have a more refined look and feel, and visually impaired listeners will be able to fully participate in comment discussions. Because of the LibSyn spam-protection scheme, blind and visually impaired listeners cannot now post comments, because the spam-protection mechanism requires reading and re-typing numbers from an on-screen image.

We also plan to install a bulletin-board style forum to make our discussions more open-ended. Listeners will be able to initiate threads of discussion on their own. This will appear sometime in the next month.

If you are a subscriber, you should not have to change anything. There may be a brief interruption in the website, but this should not last more than about a day. Regular subscribers may notice that a few recent editions of The Word Nerds are downloaded twice. We apologize for this, but hope that the inconvenience is not too great.

In any event, our existing podcast blog will continue to be available at thewordnerds.libsyn.com. We will link to archives of our older shows, but these older editions will not continue to show up in the new feed.

Thanks for your understanding and for your continued participation in our podcast conversation.

Hearing Howard Chang talk about “homophone creep? (a term that I like very much) made me think of the problem that I encounter every year when reading Hamlet. At one point in the play, either Rosencranz or Guildenstern uses the expression “niggard of question…? Invariably, the student who is reading that part pronounces the word as “ni-GARD,? because s/he is unwilling to say “NIG-gerd.?

We do tend to be very sensitive to “the N-word.? Sometimes I think that it is the only taboo word left in the English language. Yet the modern history of terminologies for people of African ancestry is confusing. Martin Luther King, in the 1950’s and 1960’s, used to refer to the struggles of “the Negro.? (Malcolm X referred to “the so-called Negro.?) When I was in high school in the early 1970’s, the term “black? (which is the most commonly accepted neutral term nowadays) was actually the beginning of a phrase which was much more hurtful than “------;? namely, “black son of a bitch.? Only recently has “black? begun to reclaim its place from “African-American? as the most common accepted term for a person of African heritage.

It’s difficult even to write about this topic, because it’s difficult to talk about race in America. We are all self-conscious about it—and that results in some occasionally tortuous attempts at political correctness. I remember once hearing someone (I think it was a liberal politician, but I’m not sure), while trying to distinguish a black African from a white African, refer to the person in question as an “African-American African.?

In a recent podcast about puns, I told a joke that may have been perceived by some as mildly racist. The term “squaw? has been misunderstood by some to be etymologically related to a prostitute, or a woman’s genitals (the etymology is actually neutral, from a Narraganset word meaning simply “woman?). I knew that, but I told the joke because it contained three different puns in the punchline—a pun on the word “square,? one on the word “sides,? and one on the word “hypotenuse.? I realized right after telling it that some listeners might be uncomfortable with the term “squaw,? even though it is not originally an epithet. If I had it to do again, I probably would have chosen a less politically charged joke.

Since Howard Shepherd and Howard Chang are both travelling the world, Dave Shepherd welcomes a special guest Nerd, Barbara Shepherd (the Love of His Life). (1:57)

Dave and Barbara talk about their favorite new podcast, Washington Travel Cast, produced by their good friends, Julie and Mark. Join Julie and Mark on podcast walking tours of Washington DC and the surrounding area. (2:46)

Dave and Barbara respond to audio feedback from Jenny B. with a mondegreen from childhood. We follow up by quoting a great Word Nerds mondegreen, experienced by Carrie and originally mentioned in a comment thread. (4:00)

Dave and Barbara, both Baby Boomers, talk about how their generation has shaped language. (6:55)

Dave Shepherd and Howard Shepherd respond to voicemail from Art in Vermont about a 'computer-generated' mondegreen. (1:53)

Dave and Howard explore the '-nym' words of linguistics: terms used to categorize types of words. Our title this week is based on Monty Python and the Holy Grail. There is great footage of an interview with the Pythons, just before the American release of Holy Grail, on The Sound of Young America. (3:12)

Dave Shepherd explains why we have a new Nerd Number (206-600-NERD). For the next couple weeks you'll hear two different numbers mentioned in alternating shows, since we pre-recorded several shows before switching phone numbers. (1:52)

Dave Shepherd and Howard Chang talk about the weather without doing anything about it. (This is a reference to a quote from Mark Twain.) (2:16)

Two faithful and helpful listeners have corrected me (Dave) on a mistake of which I was aware as soon as I uploaded the last podcast.

The acronym LASER stands for light amplification through STIMULATED emission of radiation, not simulated. The emission is absolutely, totally real, not fake at all.

Well, I was de-acronymizing (??) right off the top of my head. Got most of it right, at least!

Oh, also, one of those faithful listeners pointed us to a Wikipedia article that explains the concept of aggregators very clearly (although we think our interviewee, Julie, did a pretty good job in the podcast, actually).

So I'm lying on my bed (in the historical present tense), resting and listening to the most recent Word Nerds podcast, and my mind starts wandering. I start thinking about revolutions in communication--from the invention of the alphabet and the development of writing, to the printing press, to the development of mass media such as radio and TV, and then to the internet.

And finally, to podcasting.

And that's when a word crosses my mind: 'samizdat.' I found myself remembering my summer of 1987 at Princeton, when I did an NEH seminar with John Fleming, then English department chairman. John Fleming had a hand-operated printing press in his house, and he and his wife had a little cottage industry. In a time when small publishers were consolidating willy-nilly, John represented an important movement in publishing: a trend toward very specialized, focused, small-scale publishing.

I realized that at a time of great electronic media consolidation (analogous to the print media consolidation of the 1980's), podcasting is filling the same kind of niche. We podcasters are an example of self-publishers that keep the world of ideas vibrant.

In other words, we are engaged in samizdat--a great Russian contraction from 'samo' (self) and 'izdatyel' (publishing).

Anyway, I thought the word 'samizdat' was both á propos and interesting, and I thought I'd pass it on.

Dave talks about podcasting, does a meta-explication of both this podcast and the words 'explication' and 'explanation,' and plays the theme song in its entirety. The cherry trees are in bloom in Washington, DC.

In the last podcast, I neglected to mention (because of the timing of recording) that it was Victoria who clued me in on the term 'lost positives.' She also pointed me to a 51-year-old article in Time that talked about the same thing.
I don't feel so bad about overlooking this concept, even with a graduate minor in linguistics from Vanderbilt, if one has to reach back 51 years to find a popular-journalism reference to this idea!
Dave

(This is the second time this podcast was posted. It has a new file name, and improved ID3 tag. Hopefully it can be downloaded as a new podcast.)

Dave muses about the concept of the Word Nerds podcast; Howard S. loses his iPod and takes it as an opportunity; the trio of Word Nerds (Dave S., Howard S., Howard C.) is introduced; and Dave thinks about what it means to be not only overwhelmed, but also whelmed.